Your Solution isn’t My Solution
Last night while I was putting the kids to bed my 4 year old daughter tried her typical stalling routine. ”Daddy, I need to get something from downstairs”. At bedtime we usually read books in the upstairs hallway and both kids have a bedtime snack and something to drink. I told her that she needed to be back upstairs in 20 seconds or I’d eat her snack. She paused for a couple of seconds and then took her snack and drink with her. I didn’t bother counting to 20....
Read MoreKanban Reboot, Part II – Breaking Bad Habits
In Part I of this series, I talked about why we were changing our processes to better align with the type of work we are doing as well as some of the business challenges and different outcomes we wanted to get. It’s been just over 2 weeks since we started and we’ve done 1 retrospective as a team so far. I mentioned in our first post that we generally have a bad habit of considering all problems to be emergencies and our previous implementation of Kanban was more of an excuse to...
Read MoreOrganize Your People Around the Work
PSL provided a wealth of learning experience for me. It’s difficult to pinpoint one specific thing, however what I feel was the most important at this point in my life was the re-enforcement of organizing people around the work. Esther Derby’s session at AYE2010 gave me a basic understanding if this, PSL helped me experience it at a much deeper level. All organizations have some type of hierarchy. I’ve yet to work in a company that organizes the people around the work....
Read MoreWhy Agile is So Hard
The building we work in has shared bathrooms that are locked. We used to have 2 keys to the men’s washroom hanging on push-pins next to the door so we don’t have to cut a key for every person in the office or for guests. Recently some ladies joined our company so naturally we had a copy of the women’s washroom created. 3 keys, 2 hooks. Sounds like a problem. Well, one key has a really big-ass keychain and people would put 2 keys on one push-pin and more often than not...
Read MoreHow Functional Silos Can Damage Your Company
We’re a small company and Pete officially handles customer support calls. A few minutes ago the phone rang but Pete had just stepped out to grab a coffee. Nobody reacted. When we get voicemail in the support inbox, the ‘beep’ is audible throughout the office since we’re in an open concept office. The phone rang again. Again nobody reacted so I grabbed it figuring that the odds are a client is having a serious problem. My spidey sense was right. I didn’t...
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